Most self-awareness advice tells you to journal more, meditate more, and ask better questions. None of that is wrong. But it leaves out something important: the research says self-awareness is two different things, and most people only ever work on one of them.
If you have been trying to "be more self-aware" and not feeling like it is working, the gap may be there.
The two kinds of self-awareness
Organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich led a large study on what self-awareness actually is. After interviewing thousands of people, her team landed on two distinct types 1:
- Internal self-awareness — how clearly you see your own values, emotions, patterns, and impact.
- External self-awareness — how accurately you understand how other people experience you.
The catch: scoring high on one does not predict scoring high on the other. Eurich's data found that only about 10–15% of people scored high on both. Many people who feel deeply introspective have almost no idea how they come across to others. And many people who can read a room cannot name what they feel.
This matters because the standard advice — journaling, meditation, therapy — mostly builds internal self-awareness. Useful, but it leaves a blind spot.
What internal self-awareness actually requires
Internal self-awareness is not about knowing more facts about yourself. It is about noticing what you do and feel in the moment, and being able to name it.
A few research-backed practices help:
1. Name the emotion, not the situation. When something hits you hard, the instinct is to talk about the situation ("my boss did this"). Research on emotional granularity shows that people who can name what they feel in precise terms ("I am embarrassed" vs. "I am angry") regulate emotions more effectively 2. The label is the work.
2. Catch the pattern, not the moment. A single bad day tells you almost nothing. A pattern across many days tells you a lot. Patterns are what personality science measures.
3. Ask "what," not "why." Eurich's team found that people who asked themselves "what am I feeling?" or "what is going on here?" got further than people who asked "why?" Why-questions tend to lead to self-justifying stories. What-questions stay descriptive 1.
What external self-awareness actually requires
External self-awareness is the harder one to build, because you cannot do it alone.
The only proven path runs through honest feedback from people who know you well and are willing to be direct. Most people never ask, because the ask feels awkward and the answers can sting.
Two things make it easier:
1. Ask for a single thing, not a global review. "Is there anything I do that makes it harder to work with me?" gets a useful answer. "What do you think of me?" gets a polite answer.
2. Ask people in different roles. A colleague sees a different slice of you than a partner. A friend sees a different slice than a parent. If three out of four mention the same thing, that thing is probably real.
Where personality tests fit
A good personality assessment is not a substitute for either kind of self-awareness. But it can do two specific things that introspection alone often misses.
It names patterns you may already half-know. A high Conscientiousness score does not tell you anything new about today. It may give a name to something you have felt for years — the way you keep showing up early, double-checking, finishing things — without ever quite labeling it.
It tells you where your read of yourself may be off. If you score lower on Agreeableness than you expected, that is worth sitting with. It does not mean you are wrong about yourself. It means there is a gap between how you describe yourself and how a 50-year-old measurement instrument scores your answers. Either is informative.
The Big Five model (the one in the IPIP-NEO-120 assessment behind Defaults) is the most-validated personality measure in research 3. It is built specifically to surface patterns that hold across years, not to label you forever. Trait scores can and do change slowly with experience and effort 4.
A practical four-week plan
If you want to actually build self-awareness, not just read about it, here is a sequence that maps to the research:
Week 1 — Internal baseline. At the end of each day, write down one emotion you felt and the situation that triggered it. Three sentences max. No analysis. You are building a noticing habit.
Week 2 — Pattern hunt. Reread your week 1 notes. Underline the same word every time it shows up. The words that keep repeating are pointing at something.
Week 3 — External signal. Ask three different people the question: "Is there anything I do that makes it harder to work with me / be close to me?" Take the answers, write them down, do not argue back. You are not collecting verdicts. You are collecting data points.
Week 4 — Calibration. Take a Big Five assessment if you have not. Compare the scores to what your week-1 emotions, week-2 patterns, and week-3 feedback have been pointing at. Look at where they agree. Look harder at where they disagree.
That is how the research-based version of "become more self-aware" actually works. Slow, mostly boring, surprisingly clarifying.
Start with a free Big Five assessment →
References
Footnotes
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Eurich, T. (2018). What self-awareness really is (and how to cultivate it). Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2018/01/what-self-awareness-really-is-and-how-to-cultivate-it ↩ ↩2
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Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F., & McKnight, P. E. (2015). Unpacking emotion differentiation: Transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 10–16. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414550708 ↩
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McCrae, R. R., & John, O. P. (1992). An introduction to the five-factor model and its applications. Journal of Personality, 60(2), 175–215. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6494.1992.tb00970.x ↩
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Hudson, N. W., & Fraley, R. C. (2015). Volitional personality trait change: Can people choose to change their personality traits? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 109(3), 490–507. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000021 ↩